Sunday, March 22, 2020

Bufferbloat with Comcast gigabit with Arris SB8200

With the working from home due to COVID-19, I decided it was finally time to upgrade my service.  I moved up to the gigabit plan (mostly for the extra upload bandwidth), and that also required a new modem, so bought an Arris SB8200.  It's DOCSIS 3.1, but is apparently synch'ing with my CMTS via DOCSIS 3.0, so these tests are with it in that mode.

I ran a couple raw wired performance tests, and saw the expected ~940Mbps download, but upload was seesawing all over the place.  Per http://fast.com, download latency was negligible, but the upload was up well over 200ms.

So I moved behind my home router (WRT1900AC running OpenWRT), and ran a set of tests with https://flent.org.




All tests were performed on my laptop (2015 MacBook Pro), using the Apple Thunderbolt 2 gigabit ethernet adapter, through my home network.  So there's a bit of noise from that aspect of the setup (there are two simple GbE switches between my desk and the router).  But this is also the setup I mainly work with, so it's the one that I wanted to test.

No SQM

I started by turning off SQM on the WAN side, and running a flent "rrul" test and seeing how this was going to turn out:

Definitely not pretty.  But the download bandwidth was constrained by the router, so I guessed that the latency was all on the upload side, so I ran an upstream-only test

Which pretty much confirmed that it was primarily an upload issue.

A Piece of Cake to the Rescue

Skipping ahead to the end, here's the final result, using "piece_of_cake.qos" and limiting uploads to 35Mbps, and not restricting downloads at all (letting cake and fq_codel do their work since the router was already the bottleneck).


I need to sort out what's going on with the poor sharing.  That could be a few different things (including the upload competition for bandwidth for acks).

But the latency difference is astonishing.  I've increased overall throughput, and there's no additional latency from the load.

I also ran a 12-up and 12-down test, to see how those would do.

Download (all BE):

Again, very poor sharing.

Upload (all BE):


Cake, however, has made the upload look amazing.




I'm leaving a little bit of upload on the table, I think, but overall, not a lot, especially for the gains in latency control.

No comments:

Post a Comment